ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 209 



The progress in the Old World was slower, and has 

 been already noticed. If we rely on the narrative in 

 Genesis, it was but the seventh generation from Adam 

 when the greatest of all discoveries in the mechanical 

 arts was made, and an artificer arose in copper and 

 iron. At the date of the Exodus iron was widely 

 used ; and though bronze was still more abundant and 

 cheaper, the Phoenicians, and the tribes of Canaanites 

 trading with them, had enough of the metal to enable 

 them to arm their war-chariots with it. Yet we also 

 find that stone implements were used in Assyria and 

 Egypt up to a late date, along with those of metal. In 

 Europe, in the Homeric poems, we can trace the age 

 of Bronze, then beginning to decay among the Greeks, 

 though there were soldiers in the army of Xerxes, long 

 after, who used stone weapons ; and the discoveries of 

 Schliemann show that on the site of Troy a people 

 using stone implements succeeded one using bronze, 

 while in Santorin we find the indications of an early 

 Greek people using stone implements. In the ancient 

 Greek tombs at Mycenge stone arrow-heads are found 

 along with the richest and most artistic objects of 

 gold, and throughout Europe there is in ancient tombs 

 and battlefields a most inextricable mixture of bronze, 

 and even iron, with stone. The Roman age was one 

 of iron everywhere, so that even the Britons who 

 fought with Caesar used iron weapons; still stone 

 lingered much later in remote places, in Britain and 

 in Scandinavia, for there seem to have been stalwart 

 Saxons at Hastings who smote Norman skulls with 



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